Techster
Helluva Engineer
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I will say that having spent a couple of years at an Ivy school that the poster is correct that they take tremendous pride in their athletic programs and when they succeed against their peers. I've been to watching parties here in Atlanta to see Ivy teams take on each other.
Alot of this comes down to what does the new college football structure look like. There is the potential that thinking in terms of conferences is old-fashioned and not what the new model will look like.
There will almost certainly be a new structure within the NCAA with a top group that runs itself and then probably a middle tier and a lower tier. If that happens I think GT ends up in the middle tier.
It could also go the way that ND AD Swarbrick has been saying since about 2016, that there will be a group of schools that basically abandon any pretense of their college football programs actually being college football programs, that they will just be semi-pro teams and then you will have another group that believes the academic part of college athletics is important so they will have their own system with their own rules. He has made it clear that ND would be in that latter group and I would expect GT to be in that group as well.
My own belief is that whatever new structure evolves out of college football that GT is unlikely to be in whatever the 'top' tier is, and frankly I am ok with that.
My own belief is that the SEC is basically going to become a minor league with pay for play, and that may be through NIL or some other form. SEC will try to gobble up the best "names" in college sports (Clemson, FSU, Oregon, etc) and make it an attractive national league for ESPN and different media partners. More than likely, they will let go of any academic pretenses...some of the SEC schools right now basically have.
B1G is going to keep some pretense of making college sports about academics, but they will want to play high level college sports (see: Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Mich State). I think they will also try to gobble up national names for an attractive league, but it will be schools with an academic focus (see: UNC, Duke, USCw, UVA, UCLA, Stanford, possibly GT). This will be in concert with Fox.
It could soon be two mega leagues financially supported by the two biggest media companies (ABC/ESPN, Fox), with other revenue streams with tiered packages (with Apple and Amazon, TBS, CBS, etc.). Just look at the NFL model of how they are breaking up the schedule for different media partners.
One thing is certain, the landscape will be totally different in the coming decade. The tectonic shift is already happening. The question for us is where GT ultimately lands. In one of the two mega conferences (I think the SEC will not be an option for GT for political reasons that have kept us out since we left), or does the ACC turn into a FCS type conference and we stay in the ACC to play outside of the mega conferences like a UCF/Elon/GA State/etc.